THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION
The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man
watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn
breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is
breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for
us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in
which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees;
in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man;
with tombs like mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the
stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at
the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake
the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilised.
Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old. And among other more
important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations
about the previous and unknown period when it was really young. The two
first human societies of which we have any reliable and detailed record
are Babylon and Egypt. It so happens that these two vast and splendid
achievements of the genius of the ancients bear witness against two of
the commonest and crudest assumptions of the culture of the moderns. If
we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men and
the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the two solid
and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.
Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men
are thinking about modern savages. They prove their progressive
evolution by assuming that a great part of the human race has not
progressed or evolved; or even changed in any way at all. I do not agree
with their theory of change; nor do I agree with their dogma of things
unchangeable. I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid and
recent a progress; but I cannot quite understand why uncivilised man
should be so mystically immortal and immutable. A somewhat simpler mode
of thought and speech seems to me to be needed throughout this inquiry.
Modern savages cannot be exactly like primitive man, because they are
not primitive. Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern.
Something has happened to their race as much as to ours, during the
thousands of years of our existence and endurance on the earth. They
have had some experiences, and have presumably acted on them if not
profited by them, like the rest of us. They have had some environment,
and even some change of environment, and have presumably adapted
themselves to it in a proper and decorous evolutionary manner. This
would be true even if the experiences were mild or the environment
dreary; for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form
of monotony. But it has appeared to a good many intelligent and
well-informed people quite as probable that the experience of the
savages has been that of a decline from civilisation. Most of those who
criticise this view do not seem to have any very clear notion of what a
decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely
enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be content if cave-men
and cannibal islanders have some things in common, such as certain
particular implements. But it is obvious on the face of it that any
peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in
common. If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but
we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made
bows and arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat
were so short of armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood.
But a professor of the future would err in supposing that the Russian
Army of 1916 was a naked Scythian tribe that had never been out of the
wood. It is like saying that a man in his second childhood must exactly
copy his first. A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error
for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long white
beard. Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty; but he who shall
expect the old gentleman to lie on his back, and kick joyfully instead,
will be disappointed.
It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must
have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of
it. There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many
things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An
example of the way in which this distinction works, and an example
essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of
government. I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man,
with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the
cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric
chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant
and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to
be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very
wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can
possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that
court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of
the same potentate, ‘No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in
his seat.’ I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a
prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, ‘Visitors are Requested not
to Touch,’ or a complete throne with the inscription, ‘Reserved for the
Old Man.’ But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be
supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely
taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric
and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the
chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or
sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with
superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those
cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a
grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical.
It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even
nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain
dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that
the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest it; it
does not even begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can
prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can
be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end
of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be
defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the
citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly
been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single
sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they
sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is
equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed
to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East. But I cannot see
why the Sultan should have appeared any earlier in history than many
other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously
depends upon the superiority of his armour; and armament of that sort
comes with more complex civilisation. One man may kill twenty with a
machine-gun; it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a
piece of flint. As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling
by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with
a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in
any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might _admire_, in a
romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest; but
that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even
mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit
that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is
the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not
the spirit of a new one. As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler
of an old humanity.
It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a
pure democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural
communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing
which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation.
Any one who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of
civilisation. But he must remember that some of us really prefer
democracy to civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy to
complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own land in a
rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a village tree, are
the most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as likely as not that
such a simple idea was found in the first condition of even simpler men.
Indeed the despotic vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the
men as men. Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic
sort, there is really no reason why men should not have had at least as
much camaraderie as rats or rooks. Leadership of some sort they
doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals; but leadership implies no
such irrational servility as that attributed to the superstitious
subjects of the Old Man. There was doubtless somebody corresponding, to
use Tennyson’s expression, to the many-wintered crow that leads the
clanging rookery home. But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to
act after the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia, it
would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would
not see many more winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but
even among animals it would seem that something else is respected more
than bestial violence, if it be only the familiarity which in men is
called tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom. I do
not know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if they do they are
certainly not following the strongest crow. And I do know, in the human
case, that if some ritual of seniority keeps savages reverencing
somebody called the Old Man, then at least they have not our own servile
sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong Man.
It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and
religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather
guessed at; but that it is at least as good a guess to suggest that it
was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village as that it was as
capricious and secret as a Turkish divan. Both the mountain democracy
and the oriental palace are modern in the sense that they are still
there, or are some sort of growth of history; but of the two the palace
has much more the look of being an accumulation and a corruption, the
village much more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive
thing. But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond expressing a
wholesome doubt about the current assumption. I think it interesting,
for instance, that liberal institutions have been traced even by
moderns back to barbarian or undeveloped states, when it happened to be
convenient for the support of some race or nation or philosophy. So the
Socialists profess that their ideal of communal property existed in very
early times. So the Jews are proud of the Jubilees or juster
redistributions under their ancient law. So the Teutonists boasted of
tracing parliaments and juries and various popular things among the
Germanic tribes of the North. So the Celtophiles and those testifying to
the wrongs of Ireland have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan
system, to which the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow. The
strength of the case varies in the different cases; but as there is some
case for all of them, I suspect there is some case for the general
proposition that popular institutions of some sort were by no means
uncommon in early and simple societies. Each of these separate schools
were making the admission to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken
together they suggest a more ancient and general truth, that there was
something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear. Each of
these separate theorists had his own axe to grind, but he was willing to
use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest that the stone axe might have
been as republican as the guillotine.
But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in
progress. In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history
before history. But it is not the irrational paradox implied in
prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not know. Very probably
it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except in the one detail
that we do not know it. It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious
prehistoric history, which professes to trace everything in a consistent
course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid to the
agnostic. So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer
creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably people
very like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them. In other
words, our most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity
had long been human, and even long been civilised. The most ancient
records we have not only mention but take for granted things like kings
and priests and princes and assemblies of the people; they describe
communities that are roughly recognisable as communities in our own
sense. Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell that they have
always been despotic. Some of them may be already decadent, and nearly
all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not know what really
happened in the world before those records; but the little we do know
would leave us anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very
much like what happens in this world now. There would be nothing
inconsistent or confounding about the discovery that those unknown ages
were full of republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as
republics, empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing
colonies, kingdoms combining again into world-states and breaking up
again into small nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery
and marching out once more into liberty; all that procession of humanity
which may or may not be a progress but is most assuredly a romance. But
the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book; and we
shall never read them.
It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social
stability. According to the real records available, barbarism and
civilisation were not successive stages in the progress of the world.
They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side
by side. There were civilisations then as there are civilisations now;
there are savages now as there were savages then. It is suggested that
all men passed through a nomadic stage; but it is certain that there are
some who have never passed out of it, and it seems not unlikely that
there were some who never passed into it. It is probable that from very
primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering shepherd
were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement of
them is but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely
falsified history. It is suggested that there was a communist stage, in
which private property was everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living
on the negation of property; but the evidences of this negation are
themselves rather negative. Redistributions of property, jubilees, and
agrarian laws occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that
humanity inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful
as the parallel proposition that humanity will inevitably return to it.
It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the
future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary
seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an
amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In
spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and
the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as
soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human
civilisation in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was
the cave-woman who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little
better than guesses; and they have a curious way of following the
fortune of modern theories and fads. In any case they are not history in
the sense of record; and we may repeat that when it comes to record, the
broad truth is that barbarism and civilisation have always dwelt side by
side in the world, the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the
barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost
all cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and
institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder form; such as
government or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative
arts, mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the
matter of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing which is the
chief concern of this inquiry: the thing that we call religion.
Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters, might in this matter
have been specially provided as models. They might almost be called
working models to show how these modern theories do not work. The two
great truths we know about these two great cultures happen to contradict
flatly the two current fallacies which have just been considered. The
story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man does
not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very
often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it
because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing,
because he is exhausted. And the story of Babylon might have been
invented to point the moral that man need not be a nomad or a communist
before he becomes a peasant or a citizen; and that such cultures are not
always in successive stages but often in contemporary states. Even
touching these great civilisations with which our written history
begins, there is a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too
cocksure. We can read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense
from that in which we guess about the Cup and Ring stones; and we do
definitely know what is meant by the animals in the Egyptian
hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animals in the neolithic cave.
But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered line after
line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted to read too much between
the lines; even the real authority on Babylon may forget how fragmentary
is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon has only heaved half
a brick at him, though half a brick is better than no cuneiform. But
some truths, historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not
evolutionary, facts and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and
Babylon; and these two truths are among them.
Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation
of the desert. It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is
created by the mysterious bounty and almost sinister benevolence of the
Nile. When we first hear of Egyptians they are living as in a string of
river-side villages, in small and separate but co-operative communities
along the bank of the Nile. Where the river branched into the broad
Delta there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different
district or people; but this need not complicate the main truth. These
more or less independent though interdependent peoples were considerably
civilised already. They had a sort of heraldry; that is, decorative art
used for symbolic and social purposes; each sailing the Nile under its
own ensign representing some bird or animal. Heraldry involves two
things of enormous importance to normal humanity; the combination of the
two making that noble thing called co-operation; on which rest all
peasantries and peoples that are free. The art of heraldry means
independence; an image chosen by the imagination to express the
individuality. The science of heraldry means interdependence; an
agreement between different bodies to recognise different images; a
science of imagery. We have here therefore exactly that compromise of
co-operation between free families or groups which is the most normal
mode of life for humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own
their own land and live on it. With the very mention of the images of
bird and beast the student of mythology will murmur the word ‘totem’
almost in his sleep. But to my mind much of the trouble arises from his
habit of saying such words as if in his sleep. Throughout this rough
outline I have made a necessarily inadequate attempt to keep on the
inside rather than the outside of such things; to consider them where
possible in terms of thought and not merely in terms of terminology.
There is very little value in talking about totems unless we have some
feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem. Granted that they
had totems and we have no totems; was it because they had more fear of
animals or more familiarity with animals? Did a man whose totem was a
wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away from a were-wolf?
Did he feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about
his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves? Was
a totem a thing like the British lion or a thing like the British
bulldog? Was the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about
Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I have never read any book of
folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light upon this question,
which I think by far the most important one. I will confine myself to
repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common
understanding about the images that stood for their individual states;
and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense that
it is already there at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds
itself, this question of communication is clearly the main question of
these riverside communities. With the need of communication comes the
need of a common government and the growing greatness and spreading
shadow of the king. The other binding force besides the king, and
perhaps older than the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has
presumably even more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by
which men can communicate. And here in Egypt arose probably the primary
and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all history, and the
whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric: the
archetypal script, the art of writing.
The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half so popular
as they might be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated
gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It
is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make
primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is
fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their
religion; especially when it is irreligion. For them anything primary
and elemental must be evil. But it is the curious consequence that while
we have been deluged with the wildest experiments in primitive romance,
they have all missed the real romance of being primitive. They have
described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which the men of the
Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues; in which the Assyrians
or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted as their own most archaic art.
But none of these makers of imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what
it must really have been like to see those things as fresh which we see
as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child
discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing with the
wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting up a
wireless station. They have never put the spirit of youth into their
descriptions of the youth of the world. It follows that amid all their
primitive or prehistoric fancies there are no jokes. There are not even
practical jokes, in connection with the practical inventions. And this
is very sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics; for
there seems to be serious indication that the whole high human art of
scripture or writing began with a joke.
There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun
with a pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing
to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow
territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture-writing, like that
of the Red Indian. Like most people who have written picture-writing for
fun, he found the words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes
sounded rather like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad
pun and chanced it. So a modern hieroglyphist might represent ‘at once’
by unscrupulously drawing a hat followed by a series of upright
numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good
enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write or even to read
these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing. And if
people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it seems that
neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them from the habit),
I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient
Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the
scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them
roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal
puns grew more and more wild and indefensible. There might be another
scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the
guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a
detective story. That is how primitive romance and primitive history
really ought to be written. For whatever was the quality of the
religious or moral life of remote times, and it was probably much more
human than is conventionally supposed, the scientific interest of such a
time must have been intense. Words must have been more wonderful than
wireless telegraphy; and experiments with common things a series of
electric shocks. We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively
story of primitive life. The point is in some sense a parenthesis here;
but it is connected with the general matter of political development, by
the institution which is most active in these first and most fascinating
of all the fairy-tales of science.
It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern
writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy
with a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least in recognising what
pagan priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among the more ignorant
of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests
had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a
debate that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient
priest probably resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in
reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made the
discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient
priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing.
It is obvious enough in the fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin
to the word hierarchy. The religion of these priests was apparently a
more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more particularly
described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it co-operated with
the king, another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king,
who happened to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a
third period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled in his
stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers
common and necessary; and the creators of those common things ought
really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest
in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational
reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honour to
these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the
man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who
first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices,
there would be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with
cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists. But one of
the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it
came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.
The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government, whether
pontifical or royal, found it more and more necessary to establish
communication; and there always went with communication a certain
element of coercion. It is not necessarily an indefensible thing that
the State grew more despotic as it grew more civilised; it is arguable
that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow more civilised. That
is the argument for autocracy in every age; and the interest lies in
seeing it illustrated in the earliest age. But it is emphatically not
true that it was most despotic in the earliest age and grew more liberal
in a later age; the practical process of history is exactly the reverse.
It is not true that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of the Old
Man and his seat and spear; it is probable, at least in Egypt, that the
Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new conditions. His spear
grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher and higher, as Egypt
rose into a complex and complete civilisation. That is what I mean by
saying that the history of the Egyptian territory is in this the history
of the earth; and directly denies the vulgar assumption that terrorism
can only come at the beginning and cannot come at the end. We do not
know what was the very first condition of the more or less feudal
amalgam of landowners, peasants, and slaves in the little commonwealths
beside the Nile; but it may have been a peasantry of an even more
popular sort. What we do know is that it was by experience and education
that little commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute sovereignty
is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and it is
at the end of the path called progress that men return to the king.
Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the
primary problem of liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men
actually lose variety by complexity. We have not solved the problem
properly any more than they did; but it vulgarises the human dignity of
the problem itself to suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in
tribal terror. And just as the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy
about despotism and civilisation, so does the Babylonian example refute
the fallacy about civilisation and barbarism. Babylon also we first hear
of when it is already civilised; for the simple reason that we cannot
hear of anything until it is educated enough to talk. It talks to us in
what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff triangular symbolism
that contrasts with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt. However
relatively rigid Egyptian art may be, there is always something
different from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have any
art. There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and
something of rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows
and the birds. Perhaps there is something of the restrained but living
curve of the river, which makes us in talking of the serpent of old Nile
almost think of the Nile as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation of
diagrams rather than of drawings. Mr. W. B. Yeats, who has a historical
imagination to match his mythological imagination (and indeed the former
is impossible without the latter), wrote truly of the men who watched
the stars ‘from their pedantic Babylon.’ The cuneiform was cut upon
bricks, of which all their architecture was built up; the bricks were of
baked mud, and perhaps the material had something in it forbidding the
sense of form to develop in sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but
a scientific civilisation, far advanced in the machinery of life and in
some ways highly modern. It is said that they had much of the modern
cult of the higher spinsterhood and recognised an official class of
independent working women. There is perhaps something in that mighty
stronghold of hardened mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of a
huge hive. But though it was huge it was human; we see many of the same
social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern England; and whatever its
evils this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man. It stood,
of course, in the triangle formed by the almost legendary rivers of
Tigris and Euphrates, and the vast agriculture of its empire, on which
its towns depended, was perfected by a highly scientific system of
canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual life, though rather
philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal foundation
those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of
antiquity; the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.
Against this solid society, as against some vast bare wall of brick,
there surged age after age the nameless armies of the Nomads. They came
out of the deserts where the nomadic life had been lived from the
beginning and where it is still lived to-day. It is needless to dwell on
the nature of that life; it was obvious enough and even easy enough to
follow a herd or a flock which generally found its own grazing-ground
and to live on the milk or meat it provided. Nor is there any reason to
doubt that this habit of life could give almost every human thing except
a home. Many such shepherds or herdsmen may have talked in the earliest
times of all the truths and enigmas of the Book of Job; and of these
were Abraham and his children, who have given to the modern world for an
endless enigma the almost monomaniac monotheism of the Jews. But they
were a wild people without comprehension of complex social organisation;
and a spirit like the wind within them made them wage war on it again
and again. The history of Babylonia is largely the history of its
defence against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals of a century
or two and generally retreated as they came. Some say that an admixture
of nomad invasion built at Nineveh the arrogant kingdom of the
Assyrians, who carved great monsters upon their temples, bearded bulls
with wings like cherubim, and who sent forth many military conquerors
who stamped the world as if with such colossal hooves. Assyria was an
imperial interlude; but it was an interlude. The main story of all that
land is the war between the wandering peoples and the state that was
truly static. Presumably in prehistoric times, and certainly in historic
times, those wanderers went westward to waste whatever they could find.
The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that was in
historic times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.
Now it is worth while to pause upon that story because, as has been
suggested, it directly contradicts the impression still current that
nomadism is merely a prehistoric thing and social settlement a
comparatively recent thing. There is nothing to show that the
Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little to show that the
tribes of the desert ever settled down. Indeed it is probable that this
notion of a nomadic stage followed by a static stage has already been
abandoned by the sincere and genuine scholars to whose researches we all
owe so much. But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine
scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been
prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has
made fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity. It is
the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same
way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man, and therefore at every
stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation.
Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It
is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they
defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects than by
theories; and it will be well if any one tempted to make that
assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for
a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and
vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian
wall.
One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow. Our glimpses of
both these early empires show that the first domestic relation had been
complicated by something which was less human, but was often regarded as
equally domestic. The dark giant called Slavery had been called up like
a genii and was labouring on gigantic works of brick and stone. Here
again we must not too easily assume that what was backward was barbaric;
in the matter of manumission the earlier servitude seems in some ways
more liberal than the later; perhaps more liberal than the servitude of
the future. To insure food for humanity by forcing part of it to work
was after all a very human expedient; which is why it will probably be
tried again. But in one sense there is a significance in the old
slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before
Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the
insignificance of the individual before the State. It was as true of the
most democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism in Babylon. It
is one of the signs of this spirit that a whole class of individuals
could be insignificant or even invisible. It must be normal because it
was needed for what would now be called ‘social service.’ Somebody said,
‘The Man is nothing and the Work is all,’ meaning it for a breezy
Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile
State. In that sense there is truth in the traditional vision of vast
pillars and pyramids going up under those everlasting skies for ever, by
the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying
like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.
But there are two other reasons for beginning with the two fixed points
of Egypt and Babylon. For one thing they are fixed in tradition as the
types of antiquity; and history without tradition is dead. Babylon is
still the burden of a nursery rhyme, and Egypt (with its enormous
population of princesses awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of
an unnecessary number of novels. But a tradition is generally a truth;
so long as the tradition is sufficiently popular; even if it is almost
vulgar. And there is a significance in this Babylonian and Egyptian
element in nursery rhymes and novels; even the newspapers, normally so
much behind the times, have already got as far as the reign of
Tutankhamen. The first reason is full of the common sense of popular
legend; it is the simple fact that we do know more of these traditional
things than of other contemporary things; and that we always did. All
travellers from Herodotus to Lord Carnarvon follow this route.
Scientific speculations of to-day do indeed spread out a map of the
whole primitive world, with streams of racial emigration or admixture
marked in dotted lines everywhere; over spaces which the unscientific
medieval map-maker would have been content to call ‘terra incognita,’ if
he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a dragon, to
indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims. But these
speculations are only speculations at the best; and at the worst the
dotted lines can be far more fabulous than the dragon.
There is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for
men to fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially
those who are most imaginative. It is the fallacy of supposing that
because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it is
greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain. If a man
lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Thibet, he may be told that
he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese Empire is certainly
a splendid and spacious and impressive thing. Or alternatively he may be
told that he is living in the British Empire, and be duly impressed. But
the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel much more
certain about the Chinese Empire that he cannot see than about the straw
hut that he can see. He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by
which his argument begins with the empire though his experience begins
with the hut. Sometimes he goes mad and appears to be proving that a
straw hut cannot exist in the domains of the Dragon Throne; that it is
impossible for such a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel
as he inhabits. But his insanity arises from the intellectual slip of
supposing that because China is a large and all-embracing hypothesis,
therefore it is something more than a hypothesis. Now modern people are
perpetually arguing in this way; and they extend it to things much less
real and certain than the Chinese Empire. They seem to forget, for
instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System as he is
certain of the South Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and
doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and
far-reaching deduction, and therefore he forgets that it is a deduction
at all and treats it as a first principle. He _might_ discover that the
whole calculation is a miscalculation; and the sun and stars and street
lamps would look exactly the same. But he has forgotten that it is a
calculation, and is almost ready to contradict the sun if it does not
fit into the Solar System. If this is a fallacy even in the case of
facts pretty well ascertained, such as the Solar System and the Chinese
Empire, it is an even more devastating fallacy in connection with
theories and other things that are not really ascertained at all. Thus
history, especially prehistoric history, has a horrible habit of
beginning with certain generalisations about races. I will not describe
the disorder and misery this inversion has produced in modern politics.
Because the race is vaguely supposed to have produced the nation, men
talk as if the nation were something vaguer than the race. Because they
have themselves invented a reason to explain a result, they almost deny
the result in order to justify the reason. They first treat a Celt as an
axiom and then treat an Irishman as an inference. And then they are
surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman is angry at being
treated as an inference. They cannot see that the Irish are Irish
whether or no they are Celtic, whether or no there ever were any Celts.
And what misleads them once more is the _size_ of the theory; the sense
that the fancy is bigger than the fact. A great scattered Celtic race is
supposed to contain the Irish, so of course the Irish must depend for
their very existence upon it. The same confusion, of course, has
eliminated the English and the Germans by swamping them in the Teutonic
race; and some tried to prove from the races being at one that the
nations could not be at war. But I only give these vulgar and hackneyed
examples in passing, as more familiar examples of the fallacy; the
matter at issue here is not its application to these modern things but
rather to the most ancient things. But the more remote and unrecorded
was the racial problem, the more fixed was this curious inverted
certainty in the Victorian man of science. To this day it gives a man of
those scientific traditions the same sort of shock to question these
things, which were only the last inferences when he turned them into
first principles. He is still more certain that he is an Aryan even than
that he is an Anglo-Saxon, just as he is more certain that he is an
Anglo-Saxon than that he is an Englishman. He has never really
discovered that he is a European. But he has never doubted that he is an
Indo-European. These Victorian theories have shifted a great deal in
their shape and scope; but this habit of a rapid hardening of a
hypothesis into a theory, and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly
yet gone out of fashion. People cannot easily get rid of the mental
confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must surely be
secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the biggest
generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to
them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large
thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is
evident and enormous.
Every race on the face of the earth has been the subject of these
speculations, and it is impossible even to suggest an outline of the
subject. But if we take the European race alone, its history, or rather
its prehistory, has undergone many retrospective revolutions in the
short period of my own lifetime. It used to be called the Caucasian
race; and I read in childhood an account of its collision with the
Mongolian race; it was written by Bret Harte and opened with the query,
‘Or is the Caucasian played out?’ Apparently the Caucasian was played
out, for in a very short time he had been turned into the Indo-European
man; sometimes, I regret to say, proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic
man. It seems that the Hindu and the German have similar words for
mother or father; there were other similarities between Sanskrit and
various Western tongues; and with that all superficial differences
between a Hindu and a German seemed suddenly to disappear. Generally
this composite person was more conveniently described as the Aryan, and
the really important point was that he had marched westward out of those
high lands of India where fragments of his language could still be
found. When I read this as a child, I had the fancy that after all the
Aryan need not have marched westward and left his language behind him;
he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with him. If
I were to read it now, I should content myself with confessing my
ignorance of the whole matter. But as a matter of fact I have great
difficulty in reading it now, because it is not being written now. It
looks as if the Aryan is also played out. Anyhow he has not merely
changed his name but changed his address; his starting-place and his
route of travel. One new theory maintains that our race did not come to
its present home from the East but from the South. Some say the
Europeans did not come from Asia but from Africa. Some have even had the
wild idea that the Europeans came from Europe; or rather that they never
left it.
Then there is a certain amount of evidence of a more or less prehistoric
pressure from the North, such as that which seems to have brought the
Greeks to inherit the Cretan culture and so often brought the Gauls over
the hills into the fields of Italy. But I merely mention this example of
European ethnology to point out that the learned have pretty well boxed
the compass by this time; and that I, who am not one of the learned,
cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree. But I
can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a
little rusty from want of use. The first act of common sense is to
recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will
affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all
know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.
The truth, it may be repeated, is that what we really see, as distinct
from what we may reasonably guess, in this earliest phase of history is
darkness covering the earth and great darkness the peoples, with a light
or two gleaming here and there on chance patches of humanity; and that
two of these flames do burn upon two of these tall primeval towns; upon
the high terraces of Babylon and the huge pyramids of the Nile. There
are indeed other ancient lights, or lights that may be conjectured to be
very ancient, in very remote parts of that vast wilderness of night.
Far away to the East there is a high civilisation of vast antiquity in
China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and South
America and other places, some of them apparently so high in
civilisation as to have reached the most refined forms of devil-worship.
But the difference lies in the element of tradition; the tradition of
these lost cultures has been broken off, and though the tradition of
China still lives, it is doubtful whether we know anything about it.
Moreover, a man trying to measure the Chinese antiquity has to use
Chinese traditions of measurement; and he has a strange sensation of
having passed into another world under other laws of time and space.
Time is telescoped outwards, and centuries assume the slow and stiff
movement of aeons; the white man trying to see it as the yellow man
sees, feels as if his head were turning round and wonders wildly whether
it is growing a pigtail. Anyhow he cannot take in a scientific sense
that queer perspective that leads up to the primeval pagoda of the first
of the Sons of Heaven. He is in the real antipodes; the only true
alternative world to Christendom; and he is after a fashion walking
upside down. I have spoken of the medieval map-maker and his dragon; but
what medieval traveller, however much interested in monsters, would
expect to find a country where a dragon is a benevolent and amiable
being? Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition something will be
said in another connection; but here I am only talking of tradition and
the test of antiquity. And I only mention China as an antiquity that is
not for us reached by a bridge of tradition; and Babylon and Egypt as
antiquities that are. Herodotus is a human being, in a sense in which a
Chinaman in a billycock hat, sitting opposite to us in a London
tea-shop, is hardly human. We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah
felt like, in a way in which we never were quite certain what Li Hung
Chang felt like. The very sins that snatched away Helen or Bathsheba
have passed into a proverb of private human weakness, of pathos and even
of pardon. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something
terrifying. This is the difference made by the destruction or
preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; as from ancient
Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world that we
inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to
it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history.
That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of
water as a world. But it was a world with something of the character of
such a water; for it became more and more a place of unification in
which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met. The Nile and
the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the
Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour
of the great sea spread indeed very far inland, and the unity was felt
among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the Gauls beyond the northern
hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all
the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. As will
be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good business. In
that _orbis terrarum_ or circle of lands there were the extremes of evil
and of piety, there were contrasted races and still more contrasted
religions. It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and
Europe from the flight of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of
the Turkish ships at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more
especially suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the
two types of paganism, confronting each other in the Latin and the
Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the Punic mart. It was the
world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all
that matters most; with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of
the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition
mattered and still matters. Between it and the Far East there were, of
course, interesting cults and conquests of various kinds, more or less
in touch with it, and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to
us. The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon; and we are
told in a Greek story how these barbarians learned to draw the bow and
tell the truth. Alexander the great Greek marched with his Macedonians
into the sunrise, and brought back strange birds coloured like the
sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels from the gardens and
treasuries of nameless kings. Islam went eastward into that world and
made it partly imaginable to us; precisely because Islam itself was born
in that circle of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea.
In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its majesty
without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese
apparently took very little notice of them. All these things are
interesting in themselves; but it is impossible to shift the centre of
gravity to the inland spaces of Asia from the inland sea of Europe. When
all is said, if there were nothing in the world but what was said and
done and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean,
it would still be in all the most vital and valuable things the world in
which we live. When that southern culture spread to the north-west it
produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we ourselves are
the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries,
it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But
round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from
all extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things; the Republic
and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the
memories of the lost empires; Aristotle and the measure of all things.
It is because the first light upon _this_ world is really light, the
daylight in which we are still walking to-day, and not merely the
doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have begun here with noting
where that light first falls on the towered cities of the eastern
Mediterranean.
But though Babylon and Egypt have thus a sort of first claim, in the
very fact of being familiar and traditional, fascinating riddles to us
but also fascinating riddles to our fathers, we must not imagine that
they were the only old civilisations on the southern sea; or that all
the civilisation was merely Sumerian or Semitic or Coptic, still less
merely Asiatic or African. Real research is more and more exalting the
ancient civilisation of Europe and especially of what we may still
vaguely call the Greeks. It must be understood in the sense that there
were Greeks before the Greeks, as in so many of their mythologies there
were gods before the gods. The island of Crete was the centre of the
civilisation now called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in ancient
legend and whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern archeology.
This elaborate European society, with its harbours and its drainage and
its domestic machinery, seems to have gone down before some invasion of
its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas we know in
history. But that earlier period did not pass till it had given to the
world gifts so great that the world has ever since been striving in vain
to repay them, if only by plagiarism.
Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a
town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or
hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy,
and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been
a beggar and a balladmonger, who may have been unable to read and write,
and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the
Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman
in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that
one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in
the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such
little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the
end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its
decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its
prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might
very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well
as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely
mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man
left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another
element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been
given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem
that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are
on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a
sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical
origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in
pagan times; but he disappears altogether in later times. But Hector
grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of a
Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand
of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in
the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all
the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that
survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.
The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending; for it is lifted up
for ever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope.
Troy standing was a small thing that may have stood nameless for ages.
But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended in an
immortal instant of annihilation; and because it was destroyed with fire
the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the
hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the
first figure of the Knight. There is a prophetic coincidence in his
title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle
the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the
thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which
the Iliad ends. It is that very unity for which we can find no name but
the holy centaur of chivalry. But there are other reasons for giving in
this glimpse of antiquity the flame upon the sacred town. The sanctity
of such towns ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the
northern Mediterranean; the high-fenced hamlet for which heroes died.
From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the citizen. Hellas
with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier than that walking
statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas of the hundred
statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little
walled nations resounded with the lament of Troy.
A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that
stragglers from Troy founded a republic on the Italian shore. It was
true in spirit that republican virtue had such a root. A mystery of
honour, that was not born of Babylon or the Egyptian pride, there shone
like the shield of Hector, defying Asia and Africa; till the light of a
new day was loosened, with the rushing of the eagles and the coming of
the name; the name that came like a thunderclap, when the world woke to
Rome.